Karl Friston on Shared Intelligence and Human Flourishing

Karl J. Friston is a British neuroscientist and theoretician at University College London. He is also the Chief Scientist at Verses (NEO:VERS) (OTCQX:VRSSF). Friston is one of the most highly cited scientists of all time and in 2016 was ranked No. 1 by Semantic Scholar in the list of top 10 most influential neuroscientists. Friston is an authority on brain imaging and theoretical neuroscience, especially the use of physics-inspired statistical methods to model neuroimaging data and other random dynamical systems. He is a key architect of the free energy principle and active inference. In imaging neuroscience he is best known for statistical parametric mapping and dynamic causal modelling. In October 2022, he was named Chief Scientist of VERSES Inc, a California-based cognitive computing company focusing on artificial intelligence designed using the principles of active inference.

In 1996, Friston received the first Young Investigators Award in Human Brain Mapping, and was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences (1999) in recognition of contributions to the bio-medical sciences. In 2000 he was President of the international Organization for Human Brain Mapping. In 2003 he was awarded the Minerva Golden Brain Award and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2006 and received a Collège de France Medal in 2008. His nomination for the Royal Society reads:

"Karl Friston pioneered and developed the single most powerful technique for analysing the results of brain imaging studies and unravelling the patterns of cortical activity and the relationship of different cortical areas to one another. Currently over 90% of papers published in brain imaging use his method (SPM or Statistical Parametric Mapping) and this approach is now finding more diverse applications, for example, in the analysis of EEG and MEG data. His method has revolutionised studies of the human brain and given us profound insights into its operations. None has had as major an influence as Friston on the development of human brain studies in the past twenty-five years."

Friston became of Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology in 2012, received the Weldon Memorial Prize and Medal in 2013 for contributions to mathematical biology and was elected as a member of EMBO in 2014 and the Academia Europaea in 2015. He was the 2016 recipient of the Charles Branch Award for unparalleled breakthroughs in Brain Research and the Glass Brain Award from the Organization for Human Brain Mapping. He holds Honorary Doctorates from the universities of York, Zurich, Liège and Radboud University.

Friston's academic web page: https://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/~karl/
Friston et al paper on Shared Intelligence and AGI: https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.01354
EISM Friston interviews: https://eism.eu/karl-friston and https://eism.eu/karl-friston-2
Other EISM guests: https://tinyurl.com/5yvsy5cu
Freedman, Weyl, and Fabinger on quantum social choice theory: https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.08144

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